What's 'The Wire' got to do with us?

Why President Obama's favourite TV series has become essential viewing for
British politicians seeking to understand our 'broken' inner cities

By Andrew Pettie

9:03PM BST 25 Aug 2009

What do you imagine is Barack Obama’s favourite television programme? Educated guessers would probably plump for The West Wing, because it presents a beguilingly slick, rose-tinted depiction of what a liberal White House administration can achieve and practically bursts at the seams with “Yes We Can” good intentions and rousing political rhetoric.

In fact, Obama’s favourite show is The Wire. “I’m a big fan,” he said in a magazine interview in the run-up to his election. “It’s not a happy show but it’s addictive.” Indeed, Obama’s holiday reading includes two crime thrillers written by novelists who have also written for The Wire: Lush Life by Richard Price and The Way Home by George Pelecanos.

At first glance, The Wire seems an unlikely piece of must-see television for an American president. The labyrinthine crime drama, which was made by the US cable network HBO and is currently being broadcast on BBC Two, is both set in and a study of the faded industrial port of Baltimore, Maryland.

Over five series and 60 episodes it focuses on different facets of Baltimore’s decline: its drug-ravaged housing projects; its down-at-heel docks; its underfunded public schools, corrupt political administration and hopelessly overstretched local media. In a sense, The Wire’s primary subject is everything that is wrong with America, yet it has evidently struck a chord with its president.

Intriguingly, The Wire is now becoming a hit with Britain’s political classes, too. In a recent magazine interview David Cameron admitted that his wife Samantha would “much rather sit at home watching The Wire with a plate of pasta” than accompany him to an “exciting, flesh-pressing opportunity”.

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So why has this gritty, violent, slang-filled American crime drama, which enjoyed relatively small audiences when first shown in the US between 2002 and 2005, become required viewing for politicians on both sides of the Atlantic?

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, thinks he has the answer. In a speech Grayling made yesterday, he drew comparisons between violent gang culture in Britain’s inner cities and similarly afflicted Baltimore communities depicted in The Wire.

“The Wire used to be just a work of fiction for British viewers,” he said. “But in many parts of British cities, The Wire has become part of real life in this country.” Grayling may be correct to draw a parallel between certain aspects of life on housing projects in West Baltimore and certain aspects of life on council estates in Manchester’s Moss Side. However, the truth is a little more complicated. The Wire is resonating with BBC Two viewers such as Samantha Cameron not because it holds a mirror up to modern Britain. It doesn’t. It holds a mirror up to modern Baltimore. But aside from the fact that it is a genuinely great piece of television, The Wire feels relevant to British viewers because it provides a panoramic, multi-layered analysis of the causes of the social problems that afflict all inner cities – without resorting to the pat solutions and headline-grabbing sound bites favoured by some politicians.

At times, The Wire can appear dizzyingly complicated. It tells the story of Baltimore’s decline through the eyes of several dozen, equally weighted characters drawn from every strata of city life, from the mayor’s office to a heroin addicts’ flop house. Viewers see how blunders made by self-serving politicians with half an eye on

re-election can, several episodes or even series later, lead to a poorly resourced police force dropping the ball and criminals slipping the net.

Similarly, administrative failures in the Baltimore education system and overcrowded classrooms end up forcing neglected schoolchildren out onto the street and into the waiting arms of the drug dealers.

Typically, it is the city’s institutions – which are constantly demanding their embattled employees “do more with less” – that are at fault. However, unlike most politicians, The Wire attempts to show Baltimore’s problem in the round. It refuses to make black-and-white moral judgments about its characters. Its prevailing moral universe is grey.

At this point, readers who have yet to watch an episode of The Wire might reasonably ask what gives it such authority. It is certainly not the liberal pipe dream of a cloistered team of scriptwriters. David Simon, the show’s creator, insists that every line is “rooted in the real”. And Simon wrote from experience. Between 1983 and 1995 he worked as a reporter on The Baltimore Sun. In 1988 he took a leave of absence to shadow the homicide unit, after one of its detectives told him that “if someone just wrote down what happens in this place for one year, they’d have a goddamn book”. Simon’s resulting book, Homicide: a Year on the Killing Streets, was adapted into an award-winning TV drama, Homicide: Life on the Street.

And before Ed Burns, The Wire’s co-creator, turned to writing, he worked as a detective with the Baltimore police department. Then, like Det Pryzbylewski, one of the characters in The Wire, he quit the police to become a teacher in a troubled public school.

Together, Simon and Burns wrote The Corner: a Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood, a factual account of a drug-ravaged community in West Baltimore. It too became a TV series. The template for The Wire was set: a period of intense, painstaking first-hand research turned into a dense, multi-stranded drama. “All the things that have been depicted in The Wire – the crime, the corruption – actually happened in Baltimore,” Simon has said. “The storylines were stolen from real life.” As the series progressed and collected an ever-lengthening list of superlatives from the critics (the American magazine Newsday remarked that while most US drama aspires to the level of John Grisham, “The Wire aspires to Dostoevsky’s”), Simon was able to recruit some of America’s best crime novelists – including Denis Lehane and Obama’s favourites, Pelecanos and Price – to write individual episodes.

Viewers don’t have to take Simon’s word for the realism of his scripts. During a New York drug trial in 2005, members of a gang said that they had been watching episodes of The Wire to swot up on the latest police surveillance techniques. (The Wire gets its title from the wire-tapping technology used by the police to eavesdrop on suspects.)

In another police case, the boundaries between fiction and reality became even more bizarrely blurred: surveillance tapes showed a gang of drug dealers watching an episode of The Wire. They were enthusiastically discussing whether they resembled characters in the show, oblivious of the fact that they were being spied on by the police – precisely what happens in The Wire.

Understandably, Simon’s unflinching portrayal of Baltimore and its problems hasn’t always endeared him to its politicians. Sheila Dixon, the Mayor of Baltimore, complained that The Wire’s “overly negative” portrayal of the city did her administration a disservice. Simon shrugged off the criticism; Dixon was indicted last January for charges that included theft and misconduct in office.

However, The Wire is more than a window on urban America and its problems. It resonates with British audiences, and politicians in both Washington and Westminister, because through the bleak realities of life in Baltimore it offers explanations (albeit complex ones) for the social problems that afflict all modern cities, especially during a recession. Perhaps uniquely, The Wire combines a journalistic devotion to reporting the facts, with a dramatist’s desire to create empathy, to put the viewer in other people’s shoes.

Politicians have traditionally been quick to criticise television for simplifying complex issues and shortening attention spans. So it is ironic that it has taken a 60-episode TV drama, albeit a genuinely exceptional one, to demonstrate, in Simon’s words, “the stamina and intellectual rigour to tackle the really complex problems in our society.” Those looking for the causes – rather than the realities – of broken Britain could do worse than study Simon’s portrayal of broken Baltimore.